A Separate Peace (11 page)

“You think there's a path through those woods?” he asked in his mild tentative voice when I got near. Leper did not switch easily from one train of thought to another, and even though I was an old friend whom he had not talked to in months I didn't mind his taking me for granted now, even at this improbable meeting in a wide, empty field of snow.

“I'm not sure, Leper, but I think there's one at the bottom of the slope.”

“Oh yeah, I guess there is.” We always called him Leper to his face; he wouldn't have remembered to respond to any other name.

I couldn't keep from staring at him, at the burlesque explorer look of him. “What are you,” I asked at last, “um, what are you doing, anyway?”

“I'm touring.”

“Touring.” I examined the long bamboo ski poles he held. “How do you mean, touring?”

“Touring. It's the way you get around the countryside in the winter. Touring skiing. It's how you go overland in the snow.”

“Where are you going?”

“Well, I'm not
going
anywhere.” He bent down to tighten the lacings on a puttee. “I'm just touring around.”

“There's that place across the river where you could ski. The place where they have the rope tow on that steep hill across from the railroad station. You could go over there.”

“No, I don't think so.” He surveyed the woods again, although his breath had fogged his glasses. “That's not skiing.”

“Why sure that's skiing. It's a good little run, you can get going pretty fast on that hill.”

“Yeah but that's it, that's why it isn't skiing. Skiing isn't supposed to be fast. Skis are for useful locomotion.” He turned his inquiring eyes on me. “You can break a leg with that downhill stuff.”

“Not on that little hill.”

“Well, it's the same thing. It's part of the whole wrong idea. They're ruining skiing in this country, rope tows and chair lifts and all that stuff. You get carted up, and then you whizz down. You never get to see the trees or anything. Oh you see a lot of trees shoot by, but you never get to really look at trees, at a tree. I just like to go along and see what I'm passing and enjoy myself.” He had come to the end of his thought, and now he slowly took me in, noticing my layers of old clothes. “What are you doing, anyway?” he asked mildly and curiously.

“Going to work on the railroad.” He kept gazing mildly and curiously at me. “Shovel out those tracks. That work they talked about in chapel this morning. You remember.”

“Have a nice day at it, anyway,” he said.

“I will. You too.”

“I will if I find what I'm looking for—a beaver dam. It used to be up the Devon a ways, in a little stream that flows into the Devon. It's interesting to see the way beavers adapt to the winter. Have you ever seen it?”

“No, I never have seen that.”

“Well, you might want to come sometime, if I find the place.”

“Tell me if you find it.”

With Leper it was always a fight, a hard fight to win when you were seventeen years old and lived in a keyed-up, competing school, to avoiding making fun of him. But as I had gotten to know him better this fight had been easier to win.

Shoving in his long bamboo poles he pushed deliberately forward and slid slowly away from me down the gradual slope, standing very upright, his skis far apart to guard against any threat to his balance, his poles sticking out on either side of him, as though to ward off any interference.

I turned and trudged off to help shovel out New England for the war.

We spent an odd day, toiling in that railroad yard. By the time we arrived there the snow had become drab and sooted, wet and heavy. We were divided into gangs, each under an old railroad man. Brinker, Chet and I managed to be in the same group, but the playful atmosphere of the apple orchard was gone. Of the town we could only see some dull red brick mills and warehouses surrounding the yards, and we labored away among what the old man directing us called “rolling stock”—grim freight cars from many parts of the country immobilized in the snow. Brinker asked him if it shouldn't be called “unrolling stock” now, and the old man looked back at him with bleary dislike and didn't reply. Nothing was very funny that day, the work became hard and unvarying; I began to sweat under my layers of clothes. By the middle of the afternoon we had lost our fresh volunteer look, the grime of the railroad and the exhaustion of manual laborers were on us all; we seemed of a piece
with the railroad yards and the mills and warehouses. The old man resented us, or we made him nervous, or maybe he was as sick as he looked. For whatever reason he grumbled and spat and alternated between growling orders and rubbing his big, unhealthy belly.

Around 4:30 there was a moment of cheer. The main line had been cleared and the first train rattled slowly through. We watched it advance toward us, the engine throwing up balls of steam to add to the heavy overcast.

All of us lined both sides of the track and got ready to cheer the engineer and passengers. The coach windows were open and the passengers surprisingly were hanging out; they were all men, I could discern, all young, all alike. It was a troop train.

Over the clatter and banging of the wheels and couplings we cheered and they yelled back, both sides taken by surprise. They were not much older than we were and although probably just recruits, they gave the impression of being an elite as they were carried past our drab ranks. They seemed to be having a wonderful time, their uniforms looked new and good; they were clean and energetic; they were going places.

After they had gone we laborers looked rather emptily across the newly cleared rails at each other, at ourselves, and not even Brinker thought of the timely remark. We turned away. The old man told us to go back to other parts of the yard, but there was no more real work done that afternoon. Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

The day ended at last. Gray from the beginning, its end was announced by a deepening gray, of sky, snow, faces, spirits. We piled back into the old, dispiritedly lit coaches
waiting for us, slumped into the uncomfortable green seats, and no one said much until we were miles away.

When we did speak it was about aviation training programs and brothers in the service and requirements for enlistment and the futility of Devon and how we would never have war stories to tell our grandchildren and how long the war might last and who ever heard of studying dead languages at a time like this.

Quackenbush took advantage of a break in this line of conversation to announce that he would certainly stay at Devon through the year, however half-cocked others might rush off. He elaborated without encouragement, citing the advantages of Devon's physical hardening program and of a high school diploma when he did in good time reach basic training. He for one would advance into the army step by step.

“You for one,” echoed someone contemptuously.

“You
are
one,” someone else said.

“Which army, Quackenbush? Mussolini's?”

“Naw, he's a Kraut.”

“He's a Kraut spy.”

“How many rails did you sabotage today, Quacken-bush?”

“I thought they interned all Quackenbushes the day after Pearl Harbor.”

To which Brinker added: “They didn't find him. He hid his light under a Quackenbush.”

We were all tired at the end of that day.

Walking back to the school grounds from the railroad station in the descending darkness we overtook a lone figure sliding along the snow-covered edge of the street.

“Will you look at Lepellier,” began Brinker irritably. “Who does he think he is, the Abominable Snowman?”

“He's just been out skiing around,” I said quickly. I didn't want to see today's strained tempers exploding on Leper. Then as we came up beside him, “Did you find the dam, Leper?”

He turned his head slowly, without breaking his forward movement of alternately planted poles and thrust skis, rhythmically but feebly continuous like a homemade piston engine's. “You know what? I did find it,” his smile was wide and unfocused, as though not for me alone but for anyone and anything which wished to share this pleasure with him, “and it was really interesting to see. I took some pictures of it, and if they come out I'll bring them over and show you.”

“What dam is that?” Brinker asked me.

“It's a . . . well a little dam up the river he knows about,” I said.

“I don't know of any dam up the river.”

“Well, it's not in the Devon itself, it's in one of the . . . tributaries.”

“Tributaries! To the
Devon?
”

“You know, a little creek or something.”

He knit his brows in mystification. “What kind of a dam is this, anyway?”

“Well,” he couldn't be put off with half a story, “it's a beaver dam.”

Brinker's shoulders fell under the weight of this news. “That's the kind of a place I'm in with a world war going on. A school for photographers of beaver dams.”

“The beaver never appeared himself,” Leper offered. Brinker turned elaborately toward him. “Didn't he really?”

“No. But I guess I was pretty clumsy getting close to it, so he might have heard me and been frightened.”

“Well.” Brinker's expansive, dazed tone suggested that here was one of life's giant ironies, “There you are!”

“Yes,” agreed Leper after a thoughtful pause, “there you are.”

“Here we are,” I said, pulling Brinker around the corner we had reached which led to our dormitory. “So long, Leper. Glad you found it.”

“Oh,” he raised his voice after us, “how was your day? How did the work go?”

“Just like a stag at eve,” Brinker roared back. “It was a winter wonderland, every minute.” And out of the side of his mouth, to me, “Everybody in this place is either a draft-dodging Kraut or a . . . a . . .” the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse, “a
nat-u-ral-ist!
” He grabbed my arm agitatedly. “I'm giving it up, I'm going to enlist. Tomorrow.”

I felt a thrill when he said it. This was the logical climax of the whole misbegotten day, this whole out-of-joint term at Devon. I think I had been waiting for a long time for someone to say this so that I could entertain these decisive words myself.

To enlist. To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life—that complex design I had been weaving since birth with all its dark threads, its unexplainable symbols set against a conventional background of domestic white and schoolboy blue, all those tangled strands which required the dexterity of a virtuoso to keep flowing—I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap! bitten off in an instant, and nothing left in my hands but spools of khaki which could weave only a plain, flat, khaki design, however twisted they might be.

Not that it would be a good life. The war would be
deadly all right. But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved. And if it wasn't there, as for example with Phineas, then I put it there myself.

But in the war, there was no question about it at all; it was there.

I separated from Brinker in the quadrangle, since one of his clubs was meeting and he could not go back to the dormitory yet—“I've got to preside at a meeting of the Golden Fleece Debating Society tonight,” he said in a tone of amazed contempt, “the Golden Fleece Debating Society! We're mad here, all mad,” and he went off raving to himself in the dark.

It was a night made for hard thoughts. Sharp stars pierced singly through the blackness, not sweeps of them or clusters or Milky Ways as there might have been in the South, but single, chilled points of light, as unromantic as knife blades. Devon, muffled under the gentle occupation of the snow, was dominated by them; the cold Yankee stars ruled this night. They did not invoke in me thoughts of God, or sailing before the mast, or some great love as crowded night skies at home had done; I thought instead, in the light of those cold points, of the decision facing me.

Why go through the motions of getting an education and watch the war slowly chip away at the one thing I had loved here, the peace, the measureless, careless peace of the Devon summer? Others, the Quackenbushes of this world, could calmly watch the war approach them and jump into it at the last and most advantageous instant, as though buying into the stock market. But I couldn't.

There was no one to stop me but myself. Putting aside soft reservations about What I Owed Devon and my duty
to my parents and so on, I reckoned my responsibilities by the light of the unsentimental night sky and knew that I owed no one anything. I owed it to myself to meet this crisis in my life when I chose, and I chose now.

I bounced zestfully up the dormitory stairs. Perhaps because my mind still retained the image of the sharp night stars, those few fixed points of light in the darkness, perhaps because of that the warm yellow light streaming from under my own door came as such a shock. It was a simple case of a change of expectation. The light should have been off. Instead, as though alive itself, it poured in a thin yellow slab of brightness from under the door, illuminating the dust and splinters of the hall floor.

I grabbed the knob and swung open the door. He was seated in my chair at the desk, bending down to adjust the gross encumbrance of his leg, so that only the familiar ears set close against his head were visible, and his short-cut brown hair. He looked up with a provocative grin, “Hi pal, where's the brass band?”

Everything that had happened throughout the day faded like that first false snowfall of the winter. Phineas was back.